An L-shaped desk fits into a corner and gives you two work surfaces in one footprint. It suits home offices, gaming corners, and shop reception areas. The shape uses wall space that a straight desk leaves empty. This guide covers sizes, materials, layouts, posture, and decor so you can plan a setup that works for your room. Why an L-Shaped Desk Works in a Corner? The desk wraps around a corner and turns it into a usable work area. You can push it against two walls or float ...

The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen, it couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen. — Philip Roth We’re halfway through 2026, and according to Goodreads I’ve read 80 books so far, fiction and non-fiction and textbooks, including such doorstoppers as Life and Fate (864p, astoundingly good). And I don’t feel like I’m trying particularly hard. I still have plenty of tim...

“I will not say "Do not weep", for not all tears are an evil.” ― The Lord of the Rings On my way to the last stop in New Zealand, I spent a good amount of time at the Ōhau Point Lookout , which is known for a nearby fur seal colony. At one point, another photographer pointed out dolphins in the ocean. While they were quite far away, it was interesting to see their acrobatic talents in action. My trip ended in Kaikōura , with a rocky beach right next to my hostel. ...

Compilers, especially method just-in-time compilers, operate on one function at a time. It is a natural code unit size, especially for a dynamic language JIT: at a given point in time, what more information can you gather about other parts of a running, changing system? I don’t have any data to back this up—maybe I should go gather some—but on average, methods are small. Especially in languages such as Ruby that use method dispatch for everything, even instance variable (attribute, fiel...

ATHENS (June 2, 2026) – Shield AI today announced that the Hellenic Army has signed a procurement agreement to grow its fleet of V-BAT vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) in support of Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) operations across the Aegean Sea. The Hellenic Army currently uses the V-BAT to deliver intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. The acquisition of more platforms will increase Greece’s ability to maintain persistent mari...

Sunday came, Sunday went, but the notes can be week notes any day they want to be.  Current situation: A LIE. This photo is from Sunday when I started these and then did not finish them. It’s Monday now and I’m in bed with rice water toner pads all over my face. I will not be sharing a photo at this time thank you for understanding. I do feel very moisturized. Monday 25 May: Memorial Day, also hospital day. Having to work certain holidays is a new th...

I have been tinkering with a little tactics game not so different from Fire Emblem. One thing I'm doing that I think is somewhat novel in the space is involving a technique I learned from studying Timely Dataflow : partially ordered costs for pathfinding. In Timely, it's used to represent complex versions of time that allow for multitemporal processing . I've written about this before but back then I didn't really appreciate all the applications of them. Every time I want to do something, ...

I present here a monstrous counter-example for sparse linear solvers which operate only on an input sparse matrix. This counter-example is closely related to the nightmare matrices of a previous post , but with a key strengthening: the matrices I present here will be symmetric and positive definite (“SPD” for short). In my prior post I relied on indefiniteness of the matrix to make iterative solutions a non-viable “shortcut” around direct methods. It remained an open question to me whe...

This post is a little side-quest from my “Kafka Share Groups and Parallelizing Consumption” series. My “Kafka Share Groups and Parallelizing Consumption” series ( part 1 , part 2 ) has been laser focused on how different configurations and behaviors affect parallel consumption in share groups (Queues for Kafka). So far I’ve shown that you most definitely can hold share groups wrong . You could quite easily and inadvertently create a work queue and with the right combination of things...

This is amazing. I could hardly contain my excitement. In one moment, I held James’ latest story in my two paws. In the next, the story was published on the web. “This is the web,” James said; “it’s where dreams can come true.” In that moment, I knew I was in the right place. I had come to James’ Coffee Blog with great curiosity. I was curious about websites, and enjoyed reading what I could find on the web. I especially loved stories about everyday life – human perspectives on ...

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Yesterday, National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt delivered her last annual State of the Sciences Address . Overall the talk basically calls us to adapt to the new reality that industrial and foundation support for research has taken a far larger role in academic research. I fear we may be losing the broad academic independence and exploration that has made our universities the envy of the world. Government funding for research has become more challenging to receive, more bureauc...

Greg Wilson has noticed that lots of folks are using dodgy metrics to figure out if AI tools are worth their costs. Would you measure lines of code generated, or tickets closed? Or would you send out a survey asking whether developers feel more productive? Each of those approaches is flawed in a different way; He lists lots of common metrics, and why they are flawed. Sadly he doesn’t give any suggestions on what would be better. In my view, since we cannot measure productivity ,...

I can afford breakfast now! I can afford breakfast now!

In the hours following the news that Redhat Insights' JavaScript packages fell victim to a supply chain attack via NPM, developers and systems administrators scrambled ensure all of their projects were unaffected from a supply chain attack that steals credentials for AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, HashiCorp Vault, npm, and CircleCI before then self-propagating via said stolen npm credentials and the bypass_2fa setting. This establishes persistence via Claude Code hooks and VS Cod...

It has been an unfortunate turn in the software industry, one of many as of late, that gambling is once again one of its primary engines. With the rise of almost nationwide online sports betting, not to mention prediction markets, making odds on real-world events and extracting the money of suckers is no longer limited to island nations. It is a great American pursuit, or at least, that's what modern television sports coverage leads you to believe. There has always been an uncomfortable relati...

It's Just Broken: Oh WordPress by Pup On Tech In a recent post, the Pup ON Tech perfectly captures the absolute nightmare that is building a self-hosted WordPress site. What starts as a simple VPS setup quickly devolves into a bloated mess of heavy themes, dozens of conflicting plugins, and rigid page builders. By the time you’ve fought with broken caching layers and terrible performance, you realise that fixing the bloat defeats the entire purpose of using WordPress. Read post ➡ WordPress...

Programmers were better back in the day, weren’t they? Back when we had real programmers. Not just people who got paid to write code, but people who lived it, who were obsessed with their craft, and whose code was a lively expression of themselves. Hackers were hackers in those days before money took over the industry. Don’t even get me started on LLMs. Could there be a better example of today’s degenerate spirit? A machine to mass-produce software (not good software, just barely good ...

I recently read a blog post claiming that web components can make your design system framework agnostic. But this is down to the false dichotomy between engineers who: love React (or the current popular thing) hate React (or the current popular thing) React is probably a bad choice for your design system. But that’s not an argument against libraries or frameworks. That’s an argument for choosing something better than React. Either way, the claim that web components give you a...

The Apple Watch is one of the most fascinating pieces of modern technology for me. A gorgeous screen, an abundance of sensors, and a bonkers amount of computational power in a tiny little package that fits on your wrist. It reminds me of the Vision Pro in that a good amount of the time I put it on I can’t help but smile at how far technology has come. But it’s also weirdly something I’ve never used a great deal. Every few generations I buy a new one and try it out for a few weeks, but I ...

So here’s the thing. Late last year I bought the excellent SilverStone FLP02 , a retro-themed computer case with modern component support. It was absolutely, jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and has easily become my favourite modern case alongside the legendary NCASE M1. It’s big, relatively easy to work in with just a few caveats (a topic for another time), and yet looks the part so well. I’ve since moved our FreeBSD bhyve/jail server into our FLP02, and am giving serious consideration to an a...

A two-lane road narrows to one lane at a construction zone. Drivers face a choice: Early (courtesy) merge: upon seeing the “Lane Ends Ahead” sign, drivers immediately move from the closing lane into the open lane. Late (zipper) merge: drivers use both lanes all the way to the merge point, then alternate — one car from each lane in turn, like a zipper. It turns out that late merging produces higher throughput and shorter queues than early merging, even though it feels less polite....

Following NASA’s Artemis rejig , catalyzed Moonbase plans , and the crewed Artemis II lunar flyby earlier this year, the agency has been trying to go full speed in its grand plans for returning US astronauts to the Moon alongside placing of long duration infrastructure. It’s to that latter end that on May 26, the agency took another necessary step by announcing firm, fixed price contracts being awarded to teams led by Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor) and Lunar Outpost respectively for ...